Our strategy is to focus our resources in the areas most relevant to our clients’ current and future taxation needs. This year we prioritised developing greater industry collaboration and working more closely with the Assurance and Advisory lines of service to offer holistic client solutions. 

The launch and use of TLS Salesforce dashboards, and monthly ‘Winning Ways’ reporting, has sharpened our awareness of clients’ short-and long-term needs, thereby enhancing a greater sales orientation in our practice and facilitating more efficient planning and resource allocation.

Our new Demand Creation Platform puts the spotlight on the intersection between industry trends and important legislative developments. It’s value was demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the platform enabled us to swiftly assist clients interpret and implement the tax relief measures enacted by the Government.

Our Horizon Service Delivery Centre, meanwhile, has lightened the administrative burden on our client-facing staff, enabling them to dedicate more of their time to achieving our market focus priorities.

We will continue to embed an enhanced sales culture in the coming year, walking the journey with our clients and staying close to what matters to them. We will pursue our industry focus with dedicated account drivers to support our firmwide industry and priority accounts programme to ensure that our clients continue to access relevant and industry-specific insights and service offerings.

We have made significant strides to drive profitable growth, cost discipline and efficiency through the adoption of Salesforce and its integration with our Horizon Service Delivery Centre and Demand Creation Platform. This ensures that all opportunities within the TLS practice are loaded and tracked on Salesforce through the pursuit process, giving us a better line of sight and understanding of our pipeline. Widespread adoption of Salesforce (±85% in 2020) ensures that the benefits of these initiatives are driven across our business.

In terms of cost and efficiency, our tax CoE and SDCs enabled us to compete effectively in low-margin areas, while the Horizon SDC has introduced a standardised, simplified and more efficient and cost effective risk management process. This has significantly improved our operational efficiency and improved our credit control processes, enabling more seamless interactions with clients.

We will continue this journey in FY21 to put more hours in our CoE and SDCs. It is through the use of CoEs and SDCs that we continue to create capacity for value add services to our clients.

We continue to embrace new technology to drive improvements in the quality, service and value we can offer our clients and the career paths we can offer our people.

This year we introduced PowerBI, a cloud-based business intelligence and data analytics service to our business to enhance our internal and client-facing capabilities. We now use PowerBI dashboards to monitor our financial performance and Salesforce pipeline information to deliver valuable metrics and insights such as net revenue, planned variances, billing variances, recoverability and product splits. 

The dashboards are with all TLS leadership to ensure transparency and encourage teamwork. They have helped us to manage our capacity better and channel our resources to where our clients need them most.

Our Horizon SDC has enabled us to digitise many of our internal processes to conduct risk management. This has streamlined our internal processes and freed up client-facing staff’s time to focus on better client service delivery.

We continue to deploy digital tools as they become available, both to improve efficiencies and also to improve client satisfaction.

Roll out of our SDC and CoE programme has reduced the clerical burden placed on our professional staff as well as creating new career options and opportunities for our non client-facing staff.

Providing our staff with fulfilling careers and continuous development opportunities is an important aspect of our commitment to them and to our clients. During the year, 23 000 hours were dedicated to training, which is summarised in the accompanying graph.

Through our various thought leadership initiatives, we contribute to research and the public debate on various important societal issues. 

For example, our Taxing Times survey contributes to improving the tax system by providing a platform for corporate taxpayers to share their experiences, perceptions and needs with regard to their dealings with the South African Revenue Service (SARS) in tax disputes.

The results of our research are shared with SARS to help improve service delivery and customer relations. This  initiative also assists clients and other corporate taxpayers  to better understand the regulatory  landscape and thus helps them to improve their compliance and engagement with SARS.

Our Building Public Trust through Tax Transparency initiative  encourages and promotes greater voluntary transparency in tax reporting and recognises the listed companies that are best using voluntary tax disclosure to tell their stories, thereby demonstrating good corporate citizenship as responsible taxpayers.

Other areas in which TLS  contributed to the firm’s commitment to supporting growth and development include contributing to programmes such as Business Unity South Africa, Business for South Africa and the COVID-19 Solidarity Fund.